Private Equity Eyeing Half of U.S. Farmland

Posted on Feb 23, 2014

“An estimated 400 million acres of farmland in the United States will likely change hands over the coming two decades as older farmers retire,” with the financial industry seeing an opportunity to profit from rising food prices and biofuels, Carey L. Biron reports at the Inter Press Service.

Biron continues:

Mirroring a trend being experienced across the globe, this strengthening focus on agriculture-related investment by the private sector is already leading to a spike in U.S. farmland prices. Coupled with relatively weak federal policies, these rising prices are barring many young farmers from continuing or starting up small-scale agricultural operations of their own.

In the long term, critics say, this dynamic could speed up the already fast-consolidating U.S. food industry, with broad ramifications for both human and environmental health.

“When non-operators own farms, they tend to source out the oversight to management companies, leading in part to horrific conditions around labour and how we treat the land,” Anuradha Mittal, the executive director of the Oakland Institute, a U.S. watchdog group focusing on global large-scale land acquisitions, told IPS.